We are individuals, academics, and organizations coming together to express our opposition to Bill S-224. Its proposed amendments to the human trafficking offence will intensify the criminalization of sex workers, racialized people, and migrants under the guise of fighting human trafficking. It also has damaging, wide-reaching implications that extend to workers beyond the sex industry.

In the last few decades, groups that are anti-sex work, racist, and anti-migrant have weaponized anti-human trafficking campaigns and policies to promote their agenda. While claiming to combat human trafficking, they advocate for the criminalization of all sex work, including increased policing and prosecution of Black, Indigenous, racialized, migrants, sex workers, and their communities. Bill S-224 is another example of this criminalization that functions to further erase and silence sex workers speaking to their experiences.

When anti-sex work groups, policymakers, and law enforcement wrongly equate sex work with sexual exploitation and human trafficking, sex workers — particularly Black, Indigenous, racialized and migrants — become the targets. Raids of sex industry workplaces have ballooned with increases in anti-human trafficking funding, initiatives, and policies. In the last two years, thousands of sex workers in Canada have been harassed, investigated, racially profiled, evicted, detained, deported, and incarcerated by law enforcement in the name of anti-human trafficking initiatives. Instead of being protected, their privacy, rights, autonomy, and safety are violated and under the false guise of “protection” sex workers are cast as victims, their voices and experiences erased. 

Bill S-224 will make it easier for courts to convict people without evidence of exploitation and without proving a “threat to safety”. This will exacerbate the conflation of sex work and sexual exploitation, casting the net of criminalization far too wide and further endangering sex workers and their support networks. While Bill S-224 further erases the experiences and perspectives of sex workers by conflating sex work with sexual exploitation and human trafficking, it will also lead to the further criminalization of Black sex workers, who are already disproportionately targeted, policed and identified as perpetrators of violence, traffickers and aggressors through racist policing strategies. Third parties associated with sex workers — such as family members or employers who advertise services, translate, or screen clients for safety — are already criminalized under current laws. If Bill S-224 passes, these essential support figures will risk human trafficking charges and up to 14 years in prison. Without their networks, sex workers will be pushed underground into dangerous and vulnerable conditions.

Many other industries will feel the effects of this Bill as well. By drastically expanding the definition of exploitation, many situations could lead to a trafficking charge. Meaningfully addressing labour exploitation and abuse requires a clearer understanding of the underlying issues. These harms are rooted in unfair labour, gender, and class relations and a web of discriminatory laws and policies, and should be addressed through labour protections — not by casting the net of criminalization even wider.

We urge the government to reject Bill S-224 and adopt a human rights-based approach to the violence and exploitation faced by the communities that centres labour rights, migrant rights, and sex workers’ rights. Effective strategies must address structural barriers that lead to exploitation and abuse, including poverty, precarious immigration status, and lack of access to affordable housing, healthcare, and social services- particularly the barriers racialized communities, migrants and LGBTQ2s+ communities experience in accessing these vital resources.

We urgent the federal government to:

●      Reject Bill S-224 in its entirety.

●      Fully decriminalize sex work by removing all sex work specific criminal offences. 

●      Remove immigration regulations prohibiting migrants from working in the sex industry. 

●      Stop surveillance, raids, detention, and deportations of all sex workers, including the disproportionate targeting of queer and trans, Black, Indigenous, racialized and migrant sex workers.     

●      Support non-carceral forms of safety such as decent work, healthcare, and housing for all. 

●      Ensure full and permanent immigration status for all in Canada, without exception.

●      Invest in grassroots communities so they can support each other. 

For more information:

1. Background:   Say no to Bill S-224  

2. Joint Submission : HIV Legal Network & Butterfly 

3. Behind the Rescue: How Anti-trafficking investigations and polices harm migrant sex workers